The growing ubiquity of locatable mobile devices such as mobile telephones, cellular-enabled personal computers and GPS systems has created a demand for location-based services offering novel local content. Known location-based service applications exist to provide navigation assistance, locating of points of interest, advertising and other consumer and business-related services relevant to a current location of a user's mobile device.
While a mobile device user may be interested in the offerings of one or more location-based service applications, that user may have reservations about allowing an application provider unabridged access to the user's location information. Safety and privacy concerns may act to dissuade a potential consumer of location-based services from using a particular location-based service application able to track the position of the user's mobile device, especially in the case where the location-based service application is offered by a provider with which the consumer is unfamiliar.
Developers of applications may have their own reservations about expending the effort required to produce quality location-based service applications. Developers are often burdened by the complexity in designing applications which function effectively no matter the type of mobile device or the telecommunication carrier servicing the mobile device. Location data from a telecommunication carrier comes in many varied forms including network-originated technologies such as GPS, cell-triangulation (EOTD, AFLT, TDOA), and cell tower identity, as well as user input techniques such as address or point-of-interest entry. Dealing with such heterogeneous data sources can be crippling to the application development and maintenance process.
It would be desirable to provide a system for aggregating and disseminating location information which permits responses to location requests originating from a location-based service application server, the system addressing end user privacy concerns by controlling and limiting access to end user personal information by the location-based service application server without significantly diminishing the usability of the location-based service. Such a system should facilitate the development and maintenance of location-based service applications by addressing issues of complexity in interacting with heterogeneous data sources.